Patience is bearing up under difficult circumstances, without giving up or giving in to bitterness. Patience means working when gratification is delayed. It means taking what life offers — even if it means suffering — without lashing out.
Mark 5: 21-24
Here is a man of authority and standing, yet he falls at the feet of a Galilean carpenter. He must be desperate. His little girl is as good as dead. So Jesus, Jairus, and the disciples hurry toward Jairus’s home, and they are followed by a crowd of people eager to see another miracle.
Mark 5: 25-33
When Jesus finds the person who was healed by tapping into his power, he stops and has her tell “the whole truth,” the whole story of what happened. This woman with a chronic condition is getting attention instead of the little girl who has an acute condition. But Jesus will not be hurried. As he’s standing there and talking with the woman, the thing that Jairus feared all along happens.
Mark 4: 35-42
But precisely because of the delay both Jairus and the woman get far more than they asked for. Jairus came to Jesus for a fever cure, not for a resurrection. When you go to Jesus for help, you get from him far more than you had in mind.
Or take the sick woman. She came to Jesus for healing. She wanted to just touch and run. Jesus forced her to go public. Keep in mind that this was very threatening for her. She had been coping with a blood flor, which made her ceremonially unclean. Because of this, to touch a rabbi in public would break a great taboo. Why did Jesus insist that she go public? She needed it. She had a somewhat superstitious understanding of Jesus’s power. She thought it was the touch that could heal her. Jesus made her identify herself so he could say, “Oh, no, it was faith that healed you.” Mark 5: 33-34
Right now, is God delaying something in your life? Are you ready to give up? Are you impatient with him? There may be a crucial factor that you just don’t have access to. The answer, as with Jairus, is to trust Jesus.
Are you trying to hurry Jesus? Are you impatient with the waiting? Let him take you by the hand, let him do what he wants to do. He loves you completely. He knows what he is doing.
Note from King’s Cross: Understanding the Life and Death of Jesus
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